One Day I'll Lose This Fight
by Rosa Lui
Summary: Neji had hated Uchiha Sasuke for exactly three days after he left Konoha.


**Disclaimer:** Not mine. :3

**A/N:** So I haven't read Naruto in about two years. And then I heard about recent… developments. And this kind of happened. The title is from '_The Light Behind Your Eyes'_ by My Chemical Romance.

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Neji had hated Uchiha Sasuke for exactly three days after he left Konoha. Thoroughly despised him with a deep, burning passion until he had to shut himself in Training Ground 5 – not his room, not his house, not ever that horrid place where every aborted movement and suppressed emotion was seen and judged pulled to shreds, not that place where his father had been _murdered_ – and just sit there, breathing.

Neji had been going to be the one who ran away, you see.

He was going to scrape at the mark on his forehead until it bled and shredded and disappeared, and then he was going to leave.

Maybe he would become a Missing Nin, or tell all of Konoha's secrets to Amegakure. Maybe, he thought sometimes, late at night and breathing deep and motionless on his futon while his mind filled with blood and destruction, maybe he would come back one day at the head of an army. Not to attack Konoha, but to attack _Hyuuga_.

Maybe he would meet them on a battlefield, his uncles and cousins and aunts gaping with shock on their stony faces as he stepped forward to beat them into the ground. Maybe they would scoff, but then the killing would begin and maybe they would _plead_, and his fingers were gripped tight in the blankets and his heart rate was through the roof –

Neji breathed.

But he had been going to be the one to _show_ them, to prove them wrong, to shove their own failures and inadequacies in their faces. He would be famous, the one who got away, the one who had slipped through their fingers to bigger and better things.

He thought about it as he drove his fingertips into the weak, _privileged_ form of his cousin, the heir without any skill or worth.

And with veins straining around his eyes as he lay half-broken in the dust, he thought about it then, too, because nothing soothes humiliation like righteous fury.

It was _he_ who had learned the Byakugan on his own, he who had spied on the techniques he was too low-born to ever be taught and spent hours teaching it to himself, bastardizing it until he could use it properly.

He seethed.

Until the words of an utter idiot finally penetrated his mind, took hold like a disease and changed something inside him.

Something was breaking apart – or maybe started to heal, finally, after far too many years.

And he thought about that instead when his cousin, the one he had tried to cripple and destroy, came to _visit him in the hospital and make sure he was alright_.

He hadn't done that for her.

She was, he realized, _kind_. Steady. A better person than he, certainly.

And then the exams were over and the Hokage was dead, and Uchiha Sasuke was falling, spiraling downward into a pit of hatred he knew too well.

Neji hated him for leaving. For becoming infamous in the eyes of the village. For taking Neji's glory. And, most of all, for having a friend who chased after him until he was half-dead and bloody and still screaming, swearing through the tears in his eyes that _he would get him back, someday_.

Neji's fantasies had never included someone trying to get him back because they _wanted him around_.

He couldn't think of anyone that would.

Neji hated Uchiha Sasuke for exactly three days, until he saw Uzumaki sitting listless and shocked, pale and still.

The he just felt sick.

He felt sick enough that when Hinata walked passed him he tried to be – nice was a bit beyond his reach, but_ not an asshole_ was something he felt he could work on.

He felt sick enough to visit Lee, who was pushing himself into recovery and burned with a kind of fire Neji couldn't begin to _understand_ let alone replicate.

"I have volunteered for the rescue mission," Lee told him with a grin and a thumbs up. "We don't abandon our precious comrades, not even when they leave us behind." And he had patted Neji on the arm and walked on.

Something, again, was healing.

Neji breathed.


End file.
